I don't know how you deal with otherwise intelligent, credentialed people who are experts in their field and have somehow fallen for the largest grift in history.
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Erik Johnson
@distractal@hachyderm.io
mastodon 4.7.3Surly raccoon, democratic socialist
Anti of capitalism, fascism, genocide, and "AI"
AuDHD, BPD and autoimmune disease-haver
Games, code, politics, philosophy, small tech enjoyer and sysadmin
he/they
536 Followers
1276 Following
50 Posts
Joined December 07, 2022
Replying to
@hywan@floss.social May Proposal A win. Proposal B sounds like the usual "AI is a world-destroying, brain-destroying, theft machine but it does have its uses!"
Been playing some Cyberpunk 2077.
*puts on Unpopular Opinions hat*
I'm overall enjoying myself but the "everyone is always selfish and in it for themselves and the good people are super rare" is kind of jarring and immersion-breaking.
Its incredibly cynical worldview is very depressing. I expect some of that from a noir game but they have to constantly remind you about it.
And so far it has been humorless and devoid of any kind of silliness. The closest thing to approximate it 5 hours in has been some Borderlands-2- style humor, a guy named "Dum Dum."
You know the jokes about a thing that "insists upon itself"? It's that, but for skin-deep aesthetic cyber noir instead of pretentious art pieces.
Ran into some pro-AI "Marxists" on Reddit and my day is not better for it
Replying to
Stage 1: "Oh shit, we actually do need those people"
Stage 2: "Wow, these tools have gotten so much more expensive, maybe it'd be cheaper just to let our employees do this"
Stage 3: Trying to bring back 2022 after having lost a bunch of social and financial capital
Replying to
@eniko I’d like to especially call out the people who said putting that shit in systemd was nbd and who mocked people who called it obeying in advance.
Replying to
@GrapheneOS@grapheneos.social @Nocta_Senestra@eldritch.cafe If your platform contains "remigration," you are far right, regardless of any other policies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remigration
Remigration is overwhelmingly a far-right, and further, a FASCIST political objective, historically speaking.
Hope that helps.
Replying to
@mattsheffield Agreed. The ongoing joke amongst certain religions is that atheism is a religion, which I disagree with, but certain forms of atheism do feel cultlike, which I suspect leads to eager adherence to anything with even a veneer of "empowering the self"
Add to this the kind of "immature atheism" (I've been there) which is really just "I'm angry at religion and my former deity and need to prove it" and you have a potent combo.
Replying to
@tess@mastodon.social This has the benefit of both helping trans people and requiring JD Vance expose himself as Umvillizeth the lesser demon of mediocrity and sycophancy.
Replying to
@Lana@beige.party and one of the infuriating things is that he’s probably going to get away with this and make a ton of money, purely by virtue of people not knowing about this
i’m beginning to wonder if the reason we started hearing about the SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic IPO’s around roughly the same time frame is because they see the writing on the wall wrt AI and want to exit before the bubble pops.
Replying to
@mttaggart@infosec.exchange Limited only to casinos, prediction markets, etc.. GenAI and it's not close.
Far more destructive.
Replying to
@adrienne@social.treehouse.systems I still hold it's an addiction, not invalidating the agency of these people, but the interactions most folks have with them seem deeply psychologically unhealthy.
This looks... kinda good?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blade_Runner_2099
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2287430/Metropolis_1998/
Oh, I love this idea.
Replying to
@alex@dair-community.social I've had similar, exponentially less well-articulated thoughts. Thank you for this. Brilliant.
People need to look beyond all the other horrible stuff LLMs/generative AI are doing and realize that even if we resolved all that, the exploitative nature and cognitive surrender still remains, and that cannot be resolved in the global environment we have today.
Replying to
@arstechnica Hyperion was fascinating, I wish Dan Simmons hadn't turned out to be such an asshole.
https://karlbode.com/ceo-said-a-thing-journalism/
Title: "CEO said a thing!" Journalism
Replying to
@artemis@dice.camp The ONLY thing that has worked for me to have a semi-normal perception of time is a mostly rigid schedule that I basically treat as a mandate from the universe.
If something is outside / doesn't fit in the schedule then it's maximum shrug
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@RoseThorndyke The darkest side of me has conjured up LLM printer drivers.
I am so sorry for speaking that concept into existence.
https://youtu.be/nhYi-NTSavg
This looks incredibly cool.
Replying to
@sinbad I am so disappointed in so many people.
Most of all people who gladly let the plutes destroy art, labor and the planet for a perceived 10-15% increase in their own productivity.
But at least we know now who'd just go along with things.
Replying to
The key problem with US investment laws, norms and regulations is that they assume investors aren't delusional cultists with a ravenous hunger for monopoly money
Replying to
@cwebber@social.coop They're desperately trying to find a new, more monetizable problem for their solution.
Tying it to surveillance capitalism sounds like the lowest hanging fruit.
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@neurovagrant@masto.deoan.org Hear hear! So far the Blackfeather Court in Elder Scrolls Online is my favorite example of this.
Replying to
@baldur@toot.cafe I blocked the man claiming that anti-AI is a more extremist position than pro-AI.
Do we really need to spell out all the problems with AI for the 95th time?
How incredibly absurd. To be expected from a Stripe techbro, the payment processor that has threatened to stop providing service to multiple platforms unless they acquiesce to Stripe’s decree of what acceptable adult content is.
Replying to
@cwebber Slop is slop, at least for now.
This to me is like saying "We hate human trafficking, which is why we only traffic adults and not children!"
I genuinely don't think we can have an honest, critical conversation with most people about valid uses of machine learning and its offshoots until well after the bubble pops and LLMs become much harder to access and tech becomes much less interested in them and moves onto the next scammy tech.
Because despite how smart or aware people think they are or can be while using it, it isn't enough.
Replying to
@EFreethought @AmyZenunim I know this is a rhetorical question, but I think there are two aspects to it.
First, is that tech under capitalism but more specificially under * bros (tech, finance, etc) has become so utterly bureaucratized and middle-manned and anti-worker and wealth-transfer-y and generally just SHIT that a huge portion of everyday work is just shoveling shit around.
Second, is that the * bros square-peg-round-holed LLMs into a thing that "just works" and "saves time" when it really just changes the mode and appearance of the shit shoveling, and actually creates enough of its own shit to more than compensate for the amount of shit it's automatically shovelling (assuming that shit is even shoveled kind of OK in the first place).
Since that extra shit is not immediately visible to many people and will only be found months or years down the line, it's seen as an incredible timesaver.
And this of course discounts all of the ethical/environmental and cognitive decline issues with it.
So they literally created the problem, created a new problem to solve the old problem that results in an even bigger problem, and then with their vast wealth have been continually and perpetually trying to sell the new problem as a solution.
It's ponzi schemes, all the way down.
Replying to
@artemis@dice.camp Even with this though it's still "Oh, doctor's appointment in 3 hours? Guess that's 2.5 hours of gaming/internet/etc because I won't be able to do anything productive."
Replying to
@xgranade Agreed. I like to ask the person posting something like "Love it! Who created this / how'd you make this if you don't mind me asking?"
Most of the time I at least get an honest answer, even if it's not the one I want.
Replying to
@TheLastOfHisName I’m not sure if this is helpful, but I game on standard Debian Trixie and aside from a slight perf hit vs. Windows (out of the box, I didn’t try to optimize), the Steam version works decently.
No issues.
https://www.axios.com/2026/09/14/coxon-bernie-bannon-unite-human-ai
Please retire, Bernie.
Replying to
@futurebird I feel like the key reason my desire/appreciation for nostalgic things is linearly increasing is not because of my age but because the world has gone to shit over the past decade or so. Ever since Citizens United, really.
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@glassbottommeg@mastodon.gamedev.place Ooooo. What time do you think it'll go on sale?
I'd love to snag one.
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@shoq He's a worthy successor to Nancy Pelosi, and I mean that in the most disparaging way possible.
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@mattsheffield@mastodon.social This is a bit disheartening, because it seems to mean that the majority of people really do respond just based on their gut in determining who is the best candidate, rather than due levels of research.
And "their gut" in people who have zero political education or acumen is probably based on bullshit metrics/heuristics like "would I get a beer with that person."
In that case, it seems like charisma & being a strong orator and storyteller is sadly more important than policy when it comes to getting elected.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/jjgbozOYjpE
Title: I Played One Last Song as Bombs Fell | Goodbye to My Music School 💔 Hamidreza afarideh "Honiak Music
Replying to
@lazza@mastodon.social @Vivaldi This iteration of AI was born of TESCREAL, an actual cult, and since I doubt you know what that is, I'm just going to block you and save myself the trouble.